Where To Buy: Blizzard, PlayStation Store, Xbox Marketplace, Local Retailer

Though the original Destiny was fairly limited in what it had to offer, the third expansion for the game, The Taken King, acted as a saving grace for the game and its players as it expanded the story, refined characters, and added a massive endgame to give incentive to keep people grinding for hours. When Destiny 2 came out, players began to feel the same problems were in place. Fortunately, there was a new expansion coming out only a few months after launch, weeks for those on PC. Would that fix these problems? Not so much.

Destiny 2: The Curse of Osiris is the first expansion released for Bungie’s new game, and it adds around 10 hours of content to the existing game. You are summoned by Ikora Rey, your resident warlock friend, to investigate a strange signal coming off of the planet Mercury that reminds her of her old teacher and legendary Destiny figure, Osiris. When you get there, you don’t find Osiris, but you do locate his fallen ghost, Segira. After restoring her back to service, in which she takes over your ghost, she instructs you to enter into the legendary Infinite Forest, a Vex simulation designed to procedurally generate outcomes of any conflict they imagine. It is here that Osiris finds himself trapped.

When you enter the Infinite Forest, the first thing you’ll realize as a player is that the world that Bungie is continuing in The Curse of Osiris is incredibly beautiful. The sky boxes in this expansion of the Infinite Forest and pre-destruction Mercury are mind blowing as they’re an incredible expanse of color and scope for the game. It’s easy to imagine getting fully lost and exploring these areas, as they’re incredibly well made. It also helps that your ghost and Ikora warn you of how easy it is to be lost forever in these areas.

The next thing you’ll come to realize is that this is really all there is to appreciate from this expansion save for a few major fights. You could get lost in the Infinite Forest… if all you did was run in circles. The main story of the game only takes about three hours to finish, and the adventures that follow only take maybe another one or two. Outside of this, you have a strike and an expansion to the existing raid. The amount of content in this game is laughable when considering its intent is to bring lapsed players back in for more. This is especially egregious when you realize that many of collectible additions are locked behind the Eververse Trading Company, Destiny‘s in-game microtransaction center.

In addition to this problem, the game’s expansion also locks existing players out of content that was in the base game. If you haven’t bought the expansion, you can no longer participate in the Nightfall strikes or the raid, or the newly added heroic strike playlist, a feature that fans desperately wanted to return from the original Destiny. The additions are all much desired, but locking out existing players from them, especially PC players who have had the game for six weeks, is not the kind of thing that fans are looking for.

Finally, probably the biggest problem with Curse of Osiris is the story. In Jason Schreier’s book Blood, Sweat, and Pixels, he discusses how the original story of Destiny was scrapped and how Osiris was originally planned to play a much bigger role. Since then, Osiris has become a legend in the Destiny universe and players were excited to finally meet this mysterious guardian they had learned so little about. Unfortunately, you’re presented with a major “don’t meet your heros” story, where you get very little context into what makes Osiris so great. Instead, you are sent through the Infinite Forest to find him and fight off a Vex mind Penoptes, a cool but otherwise irrelevant boss. To get to him, you must run through the various gates of the Forest.

What you’ll quickly realize is that there is no incentive to fight anything, since it is all simply a simulation of foes who aren’t actually real. And the game doesn’t try to stop you either, as you can skip most of the encounters and run through gates, save for a few that are red until you kill the right enemies…then you can run through the gates. Instead of making you feel like a hero, the game breaks the immersion and makes you feel like you’re playing a game within a game, as is usually the issue with procedural generation. When you finally meet Osiris face to face, he speaks to you for a minute and then disappears again, never giving you a sense of real awe or satisfaction.

Verdict: The Curse of Osiris is an extremely pretty expansion that has very little to offer below the surface. In addition to this lack of endgame content to keep people playing, it locks out existing players who haven’t bought the expansion from some major content in the base game. By doing this, they’ve managed to do even less in this addition than the original Destiny did with its first expansion. Unless you are interested in continuing the grind for loot boxes or looking at a pretty world for a few hours, I can’t really recommend the expansion.

Destiny 2: The Curse of Osiris Review

Destiny 2 Expansion I: Curse of Osiris continues your Guardian’s journey with all-new story missions and adventures set in a new destination, Mercury. Journey through time and space to learn the secrets of Osiris, avert a dark future, and rebuild the ties between the legendary Warlock and his greatest student – Ikora Rey.

Overall Score

Disappointing

Pros:

Beautiful sky boxes

New hub on Mercury

Heroic strikes

Cons:

Boring story and characters

Content locks existing players out of base game content

New weapons and skins locked behind loot boxes or repetitive grinding of public events